Webmasters and copyright holders unable to afford a lawyer to protect them at every turn usually turn to the use of the DMCA.
In most of the cases DMCA take-down requests are sent to the owner of a specific website or product that has listed copyrighted content. There are easier solutions to get copyright content removed from certain websites but most webmasters or copyright owners use a wrong approach. Google also receives DMCA take-down requests for certain URLS that infringe on someone’s copyright. Google indexes the whole web so that it can offer relevant search results. When it has indexed someone’s serial number or a download link for a copyrighted song Google can offer these in someone’s query. Copyright holders do not like to see this and they end up making a DMCA take-down request.
Last month Google received a record number of URL take-down requests. In the week starting with 09.07.2012, Google was asked to take down close to 720,000 URLs, that’s more than the previous record of ~610,000 URL take-down requests in June.
Last week the number of received take-down requests was for 1.5 million URLs. That’s more than double compared to the week before. One year ago Google received close to 130000 requests per week (almost eleven times less than it does now). Google posts all take-down requests to its website ChillingEffects.org. Google is seeing a continuously increasing number of take-down requests because rights holders are showing an increased effort in having links to copyrighted content removed from the search engine database.
